A Hearing Aid enhances hearing by amplifying voices detected by a sensitive microphone, while bringing an individual's reduced hearing response at various audible frequencies, to the level of hearing of a normal person, which is defined roughly as the ability to hear sounds on an absolute scale of 0 to 25 dB. The modified sound is then delivered into the user's ear canal.
Hearing Aids also use various algorithms to suppress noise, echo and eliminate receiver-to-microphone acoustic feedback.
Hearing devices may be situated behind-the-ear (BTE), in-the-ear (ITE) or completely-in-the-ear canal, (CIC).
In recent years the use of cellphones in relaying voice messages from one person to another has increased enormously. The advent of cellular phones has caused many problems for the hearing impaired people wearing one of the hearing aids in or behind the ear, starting from the electromagnetic interferences between the two devices that are in close distance one from the other and the physical encumbrance caused by placing the cellphone over the hearing aid. Several solutions to these problems have been devised, including the use of inductive communication between the cellphone and the hearing aid device through the use of telecoils or resolving the causes of interferences. However to the best of our knowledge no radical solution to the hearing impaired people in the cellular phone age has been suggested nor implemented.
One of the technological problems of the (BTE), (ITE) or (CIC) type hearing aids is the determination of the direction of the sound reaching the ear; precise determination of the direction of sound enables to eliminate unwanted sources of sound and greatly improve SNR. This problem is currently dealt by using directional microphones that alleviate the problem (see U.S. Pat. No. 3,770,911). Some previous art solutions have suggested using two microphones and measuring the phase delay between them for determining the sound direction, however if the two microphones are very close the determined direction is not accurate. There have been several applications to put several microphones on the eyeglasses temples (see U.S. Pat. No. 3,247,330, U.S. Pat. No. 4,773,095; U.S. Pat. No. 7,192,136; U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,031,483; 7,609,842, 20090252360) for finding the direction of sounds however the technological implementations of these devices have been unsuccessful. There are also no cellphones that, working collaboratively with “hearing eyeglasses”, eliminate unwanted directional or non-directional sound.